Tresure Trove

Scatter and Gather

People old enough to have worked on Mainframes and storage arrays will be familiar with the phrase above – it is also know as Vectored I/O. But this post is not about that.

It is about a life (mis)management philosophy; it is about a paradigm shift in managing business and crisis.

Now scatter and gather is a two pronged strategy –

1) Scatter

2) Gather

Yeah! Genius that’s it. Now to elaborate!

First comes the scatter – this is the part where you divide the problem into little parts and spread the work load around.

The key here is to set clear boundaries and responsibilities and align the stick and carrots for each party.

Then comes the Gather – get all the required parts and put together as one whole.

Simple isn’t it! Not actually – the greatest fallacy of this approach is that it appears simple.

There are two major points in human nature that make it unsuccessful everytime

1) you can’t get people to own responsibility to something completely and do as told. No they will come back and say that they thought that something-something was XYZ’z responsibility

2) people love meddling with other people work
So this is completely useless, you may think! You may also think that reading this post was a complete waste of your time. Well NO.

See the point that I wanted to make was very simple. Many of life challenges are simple to solve, to get over and get a move on, but that’s exactly the reason we can’t and fail repeatedly.

Take for example the case of the hope less couple – who want to break up and move on! (Scatter) and marry according to their parents choice (weather they are in love or not is another post). They want to move on and gather their life back without the habit of the other person in their life.

Simple isn’t it. But most fail here.

Another example is a plan that needs to be put together! You need it to be perfect! The best approach sounds like spreading the work between the concerned parties! Giving the fiance guys the numbers, the marketing the communication and branding and the business managers the GTM (go to market) strategies and they sit down and put it all together.

It sounds simple and like the right approach – that’s why it is the wrong one.

So whats the right thing to do?

Well in the Business plan it is best to get everyone in the same room – get a KT and make the damn thing yourself. That way everything fits in together perfectly – all numbers match up and you never end up over committing. The best way is to gather and then process. Scatter is the difficult part.